Playing Chicken
by Greer Shlivandas
Summary: Shitan returns to his house in Lacan after the end of the game, only to learn the hard way that an unwatered garden bears no fruit.


Notes: Most of this story was written two years ago, and then abandoned. For reasons too numerous to name, it was recently dragged back out and finished. Mild yaoi warnings. Shitan is the Japanese spelling of Citan, for those who don't know. 

This fic is dedicated to my grandmother, and the memory of my grandfather, R.I.P. March 10, 2001.

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**PLAYING CHICKEN**

The house was more or less, exactly as she had left it. 

Laundry flapped stiffly from the line like a row of paper cutouts, now stained permanently by birdshit and rainstorms. Food had been left to rot in the pantry, turning into a festival of ants and weevils. Random tufts of feathers stuck up where scavengers had dragged the chickens, which Yui must have strangled to free them from lingering deaths by starvation. Flies whirled like living smoke through dead leaves capping the cistern, tannins staining the water the color of roasted tea. A length of fabric lay cut out on the kitchen table, two halves of a skirt partly pinned together as if the maker had simply stepped away and meant to return in short order.

Yet the house betrayed itself; the details telling a different story. Yui's jewelry case was missing from her dresser, as was the flat box with her grandmother's wedding clothes gone from beneath her bed. All of Midori's toys had been carefully gathered up and sent along to Shevat, along with both of the block quilts Yui had spent an entire winter making. There were gaps in the bookcases. Her journal was gone from behind that loose brick in the foundation where she had hidden it, unaware that Shitan even knew of its existence. And Dios save them all, she had taken the beribboned blue nightgown that no longer fit her, which he had given her has a first anniversary present.

She had left no note, but it was tactlessly obvious. Her flight from the house had been no disaster-driven escape from the ruins of Lacan; but rather a clean and surgical severing of any ties she had to the life they had lived here. He half-expected to find her wedding ring sitting on his desk, or on the kitchen table, but eventually it turned up wet and gummy on the bathroom floor. She must have had to soap up her hand to get it off, and had simply left it where it fell, like a piece of lint picked off her sweater.

His own ring was somewhere in Sigurd's quarters on the Yggdrasil. His friend had yanked it off between kisses, not wanting even the symbol of his marriage to bear witness to that act of mutual disloyalty. Jessiah had noted its disappearance with silent approval; Jessiah's son with silent scorn. But all of them knew what it meant when Yui greeted him in Shevat with the pleasant civility of a stranger, her own fingers bare.

She hadn't even known his real name. 

The crew was waiting for him now, just outside the gate; shuffling their feet in the dirt and kicking at the overgrown tangles of weeds, laughing at the irreverent graffiti on his sign_._ They know that when he comes out he'll be Hyuga again, ex-Element of Solaris, and the only one who knew what was really going on, all along. Old friends and new ones alike, all waiting for him to turn his back on the lie he had lived here; on the unfinished dress, the soapy ring, the missing toychest, the empty bed. Now it was Sigurd in his bed most nights, sometimes Jessiah, and once even Fei- not for love, but just for the comfort of being with whatever was left of the life he knew. He didn't know what to feel when it was Sigurd he bumped into instead. Or how a man could come home to where he knew he belonged, and still feel so horribly alone.

You can save the world, and still waste your time. You can save the world, and have nothing left to show for it. You can save the world, without making it a world worth living in. You can fly your ship right into the side of a mountain, trusting your luck or skill to turn before it hits, but sooner or later your death-wish will win.

Shitan did not bother to lock the door behind him. There was no one left to keep in or out, after all. The grass beneath him crunched as he walked back to his friends, carrying only the scant handful of items he wanted to bring with him, the weight of his footsteps crushing delicate little bird bones. His lawn was covered in heaps of feathers. They might have once been the corpses of chickens, or the bodies of fallen angels.


End file.
